But boardrooms laid with Interface carpet tiles looked and felt a million dollars.

ECONOMIST: Ray Anderson

Manufactured by NatureWorks, a subsidiary of agri-giant Cargill, Ingeo is now showing up in everything from socks and shirts (ecowearusa.com) to carpet tiles (interfaceflor.com).

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The first of those innovations came in the 1970s, when he founded Interface to become the first manufacturer of modular carpet tiles.

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It was the very same feeling, he said later, as when he had first seen carpet tiles, but orders of magnitude larger.

ECONOMIST: Ray Anderson

But the real money is in flooring: Mohawk Industries , which makes all sorts of flooring from ceramic tile, to carpet tiles to rugs.

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When a wool carpet surpasses its utility, it gets turned into secondary fuel for the cement industry, and the leftover chalk gets used for backing carpet tiles.

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Mr Lee said the blaze quickly spread into the living room, melting polystyrene ceiling tiles which dropped on to the carpet, setting it and a curtain alight.

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His product, too, was much less wasteful than broadloom carpet, since you could easily cut the tiles to run cables underneath, and replace them one by one as they wore out.

ECONOMIST: Ray Anderson

Witness to that are the arcade's dark blue carpet (salvaged from a Vegas convention hall), mismatched ceiling tiles and a change machine that Arnold scavenged from a dumpster behind the Golden Nugget casino.

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